Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Reinforced / 4 Hero

4 HERO

PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Selector/Crammed

Alternative Press, 1996?

by Simon Reynolds

Originally released in late '94 by
influential UK drum & bass label Reinforced (for whom 4 Hero are house
band), 'Parallel Universe' was the first of a spate of single-artist 'armchair
jungle' albums (see also Omni Trio, A Guy Called Gerald). Appropriately,
"Parallel" illustrates all the possibilities and perils of
'art-core'. With its astrophysical imagery (titles like "Solar
Emissions" and "Sunspots"), its cosmic utopianism, its jazzy
cadences, this music is basically a digitized update of the early '70s
fusion of Weather Report and Herbie
Hancock. The downside is occasional lapses into jazz-funk mellowness, e.g. the
cheesy sax solo and creamy garage-diva vocal that mars "Universal
Love". The upside is the astonishingly intricate array of multi-tiered
breakbeats (processed and pitchshifted so they're textural as much as
percussive) and the hall-of-mirrors production, wherein sounds morph as eerily
as Salvador Dali's melting clocks. 4 Hero's mutational, maze-like aesthetic is
at its most mindwarping on "Terraforming" and "Wrinkles In
Time". At its best, "Parallel Universe" is black science-fiction
in full effect, Sun Ra's "Disco 3000" meets William Gibson.

REINFORCED label profile

Spin, 1998

by Simon Reynolds

Reinforced is one of those labels--think SST or Homestead vis-a-vis

proto-grunge--that literally makes history, even if its releases never

make the Billboard Top 200. Since 1990, the London-based
drum 'n' bass

imprint has been building the future, breakbeat by
breakbeat. Reinforced

alumni include pioneering producers such as Goldie
(operating under his

early alter-ego Rufige Cru) and Doc Scott (a/k/a Nasty
Habits), while its

"house band" 4 Hero have crafted arguably the most
consummate and

consistently ahead-of-the-game oeuvre in jungle.

Rob
Playford--Goldie's erstwhile co-producer and boss of the

similarly seminal drum 'n' bass label Moving Shadow -- once
described

Reinforced as the scene's "research lab". Although
the label had a couple

of near chart-hits during Britain's early Nineties hardcore
rave explosion,

Reinforced have generally operated about a year in advance
of their own

genre. Inevitably, more canny and market-conscious labels
have reaped the